Ever heard of Gamel Woolsey? I hadn't till I found this in the Notting Hill Gate Book Exchange a few weeks ago. Not entirely surprising as she published only this one novel -- and even this has a rather interesting publication history. Written in the early 1930s, it was accepted for publication and then withdrawn, apparently because the publishers got nervous after the successful prosecution of The Well of Loneliness. So it was not till 1987 that it finally saw the light of day, published by Virago.
Now let me hasten to say that despite the title and the association with Radclyffe Hall, this is not a lesbian novel. The link between the two books is so-called sexual explicitness, though by today's standards One Way of Love is relatively tame -- it certainly wouldn't be a contender for the bad sex award (or the good one if such a thing existed). But sex is certainly at the heart of this actually rather sweet and innocent story of a young girl's first marriage.
Mariana Clare, born in the Deep South of the United States, is a romantic child and a great reader of fairy tales, which convince her of the existence of eternal love. Orphaned at a young age, she has lived with her grandmother until the old lady dies, at which point Mariana decides to move to New York. Amazed and bemused by city life, she falls in with a group of bohemian young people and is quite astonished by their sexual openness. Soon she meets Alan, an English journalist, who becomes passionately obsessed with her, though he has the sense to take his time and woo her very slowly. Eventually his desire gets the better of him and he manages to seduce her, though her only thought at this point is "It might as well be he. It might as well be he". Mariana at first is unwilling to let this continue, but as time goes on she comes to respond to his lovemaking, and they decide to marry. But Mariana is always conscious that this relationship does not in any way correspond to her romantic dreams. Alan, she knows well, though he is passionately "in love" with her, does not love her. It is her body that he so urgently desires, and he does not fully appreciate her as a person in her own right. They separate, come back together, separate again, and the novel ends with Mariana on her own, living a a cottage in a wood, taking lovers to stave off the loneliness .
For this -- a voice in her mind continued, mocking her -- you will go to Hell. I will go to Hell, she answered herself gaily, and I shall have lovers there, since I cannot find a true love anywhere, her mind added wistfully. Surely there will be some man without a girl who will have me?
Of course Mariana is only twenty-three, and we know well that her life will not be as sad as this may suggest. And indeed the novel is heavily autobiographical -- Alan is based on Gamel's first husband Rex Hunter, and she was to marry again as well as having a passionate love affair with the married Llewelyn Cowper Powys. It's easy to see autobiography at work here -- sometime it read to me almost like a transcribed journal. But that doesn't make it any less enjoyable or interesting, and it doesn't mean that the experiences and feelings it describes are any less recognisable to the rest of us. I suspect that there would be many young girls, even now, who would be able to relate to Mariana's nervousness about sex and her growing realisation of what it is that Alan wants her for. As for Alan, he is brilliantly portrayed -- a skilful lover, with strings of past affairs, he doesn't really like women and in fact quite early on we see him taking pleasure in her pain: "He felt her shrinkig and quivering underneath him. And the knowledge that he was hurting her gave him the most exquisite, the most tender pleasure". As the marriage progresses, Mariana sees herself as not much more than a courtesan, "worn with caresses one hour and scolded like a tiresome servant the next". And later in the novel there is quite a chilling episode when Mariana becomes pregnant and Alan is actually repelled by the idea of how her body will becomes, as he sees it, grotesquely distorted.
I read this straight after Henry Green's Living, and it took me a while to get use to the simplicity of the style. But I came to enjoy it very much. It's never been republished but you could certainly find it on abe books and other such sites. Nice.
